“Art is a simple thing that should produce complex feelings”: these are the words of Giuseppe Penone, head of the Arte Povera movement. In 1968, a year of youth protests, Penone experienced his own revolution. He went to the mountains and observed people working on the land. During long walks he made through Liguria and Piedmont, he thought about the ways in which man interacts each day with nature and its elements. Penone’s first works feature trees. He sculpted a tree, removing its concentric layers to arrive at its core. He surrounded a trunk with a zinc thread. He also set a bronze cast of his own hand on another trunk, in doing so marking it forever; allowing him to possess it and be possessed by it.

Condividi

Making a tree, being a tree

“Art is a simple thing that should produce complex feelings”: these are the words of Giuseppe Penone, head of the Arte Povera movement. In 1968, a year of youth protests, Penone experienced his own revolution. He went to the mountains and observed people working on the land. During long walks he made through Liguria and Piedmont, he thought about the ways in which man interacts each day with nature and its elements. Penone’s first works feature trees. He sculpted a tree, removing its concentric layers to arrive at its core. He surrounded a trunk with a zinc thread. He also set a bronze cast of his own hand on another trunk, in doing so marking it forever; allowing him to possess it and be possessed by it.